Confused cicadas are emerging 4 years early in the Southeast, scientists say
A massive grouping of cicadas is due in parts of the Southeast later this month after 17 years underground — but another brood may have beaten them to it.
That group, known as Brood XIX, isn’t due until 2024. They typically emerge once every 13 years and were last spotted in 2011, according to Cicada Mania. But scientists mapping the arrival of these periodical creatures say some have recently been spotted all up the East Coast.
“Sometimes periodical cicada get their timing mixed up and may emerge early or late,” said Gene Kritsky, dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, in a news release.
Early arrivals
Kritsky created the app “Cicada Safari” to help track the insects, allowing users to submit pictures and videos that help researchers map the cicadas’ location and identify which brood is emerging.
According to the app, scientists have verified sightings of Brood XIX in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and central North Carolina this month.
Users in Charlotte, North Carolina, and outside of Augusta, Georgia — right on the border of South Carolina — had posted at least 16 photos each of various cicadas as of Wednesday afternoon. About eight were spotted outside of Macon in Georgia, and another four were seen near Birmingham, Alabama.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether those photos were entirely from Brood XIX.
Submitting photographs of the underside of these cicadas to Cicada Safari can help researchers identify their brood, Kritsky said in the release.
“These off-cycle cicadas provide clues to the relationships of the broods to each other,” he said.
There are 15 broods of periodical cicadas that stay underground for between 13 and 15 years, according to the U.S. Forest Service. They rely on environmental clues to know when it’s finally time to emerge — typically when the soil temperature gets to 64 degrees in mid May, Kritksy said.
“Periodical cicadas are bugs of history,” he said said. “They are generational events, and many people use the emergence to mark the passage of time, recall key events in their lives and just remember where they were and what they were doing the last time the cicadas came out.”
Not unprecedented
According to Cicada Mania, it’s “odd” for cicadas with a 13-year cycle to emerge early “but not impossible.”
In 2017, entomologists said critters from Brood X — which appear every 17 years — arrived four years early in parts of Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland, The Baltimore Sun reported.
Scientists attributed it in-part to climate change, which was thought to be helping the cicadas grow faster and thereby emerge sooner than expected, according to The Sun.
But when the same thing happened in 2000 with members of Brood X arriving four years early, Popular Science reported their numbers were strong enough that many survived.
Kritsky, who had predicted the premature emergence, said the early risers in 2017 might be descendants of those who survived in 2000, according to Popular Science.
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 3:15 PM with the headline "Confused cicadas are emerging 4 years early in the Southeast, scientists say."
